ABSTRACT
I think it can be said that these are almost completely avoided by M.Ferdinand Alquié in two of his books: Le Désir d’éternité (1943) and La Nostalgie de l’être (1950). I shall deal with the second of these two first, since it concerns the more general question of being. Alquié begins by stating his position clearly. He is concerned with ‘the eternity of philosophy’ which is to be sought, not in the content of its formulas, but in the constant re-enactment of the procedures which bring these formulas into being.1 He goes on to point out the danger of historical realism, a danger which he thinks is too often overlooked. He indicts Hegel specifically for neglecting philosophy in favour of a cult of history. He rejects, moreover, as unphilosophical any attempt to present the history of thought as quantitatively constituted through retention of the ‘essence’ of the work of individuals, which is made to form a patchwork mosaic of ideas. One can prefer Descartes’s to others, but one cannot refute them and yet claim that their contribution is part of a valuable heritage, part of a progressive groping towards the Truth. Such a course involves the confusion of science and philosophy. Philosophy is not a collection of objective truths or errors, but the outcome of the total response of a mind to the objective conditions it encounters. A philosophy can be accepted or rejected, but not absorbed into an impersonal body of thought.1 The progressive or dialectical conception of the history of ideas is here repudiated. And in answer to all those who try, in general, to see the past as in any way purified, preserved and in some manner redeemed in the present, Alquié points out, with a commendable clear-sightedness and sincerity, that people, for example, who lose those near to them whom they love, know with a conviction impervious to the claims or persuasion of any system, that time too often means privation and not dialectical transcendence.2 As Santayana wrote:
Examining the character of metaphysics, Alquié maintains that it has traditionally shown, not the nature of man in the light of his history, but that through his liberty man escapes from
history.4 The motive dominating a good deal of contemporary philosophy of all kinds is one of vague apprehension that somehow philosophy is destined to be reduced to concerning itself with a completely vacuous absolute, to a concept of being as that which all things have in common, namely nothing. This apparently imminent removal from philosophy of all tangible content, making philosophers into marginal people who have no influence on the world’s affairs and the development of history, results in a tendency to value force and fact. The result is that philosophy takes its criteria from what it should be judging, and elects to base itself on the object to which it is assigning a place in the scheme of things. Marxists and a number of independent individual philosophers are criticized for having allowed their idea of philosophy to become ‘contaminated’: Bergson, Brunschvicg and Merleau-Ponty. In contrast Cartesian doubt, Kantian criticism and even the introspection of Maine de Biran begin with the basic act of mind seeking a relationship between spirit and object, recognizing that the latter can be known, whereas the former is ‘known’ only through awareness of its absence. ‘Pure metaphysics encompasses nothing and supersedes nothing: nor does it presuppose anything as anterior to it.’1 Alquié, as we have seen, is severe on Lavelle’s contamination of the notion of being.2 Lavelle is taken to task for overfamiliarity with Being, for claiming that we are ‘on a level with it’.3 There is a good deal of obscurity in the last paragraph criticized, but it is noticeable that towards the end of it Lavelle says: ‘I detach myself from being only in order to establish my own limitations which I am constantly trying to overcome.’ I wonder whether Alquié would regard this as so very exceptionable. After all, in his Le Désir d’éternité, about which I shall have something to say, self-detachment from an impersonal spirit is what constitutes the act of rational thought as distinct from any search for its source.4 However, it is probably the case that in philosophy expression is all, and that if one is to talk, literally about nothing, one had better not employ analogies which reify it. Perhaps if one insists on writing a work of some 1,200 pages on nothing, one will be unable to avoid the trap of making something of it. At all events Alquié’s examples of more obvious cases of the contamination of the concept of being by objectification cannot be defended, and it must be conceded that Lavelle is too often extremely unclear.
